"Mitochondrial ATP synthesis rate was measured ex vivo with a chemiluminescence technique as previously described (16)".

Reference 16 is the one from which all of the above graphs have been taken. The isolation, washing and feeding of the mitochondria have not been changed. Yet now, in a clinical study showing the wonders of free fatty acid reduction, we get this:

We can ignore the acipimox groups and use the pre treatment open columns. Look at ATP yield from Pyr, this is pyruvate 2.5 mmol/l. Now look at PMC 0.5 and PMC 1. Here we have palmitoyl carnitine being added at either 0.5 mmol/l, ie 500 micromol/l or even 1000 micromol/l, giving comparable rates of ATP synthesis to pyruvate 2.5 mmol/l. That 1000 micromol/l is one hundred times the concentration used in their first paper to shut down electron flow and collapse delta psi.

Where did the inhibition of electron transfer from reduced CoQ to complex III by palmitoyl carnitine go to? What changed?

They went from basic science to a clinical application. Was the basic science correct? Is the clinical paper correct? An interesting set of changes. Makes me thing of the degradation we see so commonly in research, from something which looks sound to something which looks incomprehensible.

Hi Peter,It got me so curious I tried to find a difference in methodology to explain that, by reading thru those papers. Nothing obvious! How come mitochondria shutting down almost completely on FA metabolite in 2008, somehow completely recover showing no effect at hundred times the dosage in 2014? Very weird! The same analytical techniques was used, even have the same two of the co-authors. Did you try to ask them for explanations?

Stan, I've just butchered their copyright graph and dished their logic and probably their integrity. I might not get a polite reply. DeFronzo, the corresponding author of the diabetic/acipimox paper is group leader for that study and group leader for the earlier basic science paper. If anyone would like to try a polite query, unassociated with Hyperlipid, feel free to do so and update us on the ensuing silence! As group leader he might not actually know how they wash the mitochondria!!!! One big down of being group leader is you don't get in to the lab much.

If you want good mitochondrial research just look at Dr. Doug Wallace before you look anywhere else. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwbIR2yUziw2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701522/

This is exactly what Richard Feynman warned about - cargo cult science . It looks like science - but it is not.

Today, it is worse than the oil-drop slowly changing numbers.

I think there are 2 things at the center of the trend of bad science. One is the grant-money-machine - the goal is to get the money - or to get the degree - not to further science.

The other is the infection of the universities with irrational philosophy - post modernism in particular. No longer do graduates actually learn and master the scientific method - I remember an old college level textbook on the scientific method (couldn't find it to share the in my stacks of books for the exact name (but found a second copy of Hecht's Optics!)). At some place students spent a whole semester pouring over this book - examples of how to set up experiments, where the pitfalls were. Lots of clever tricks for designing experiments. But today I've not seen students working on such a course. Instead there seems to be constant confusion between the 'stamp-collecting' step and the testing step. Correlations do not show causation.

This postmodernist philosophy basically says that it is really easy to be biased in doing science (which is true), but their solution is to give up on being objective. Doing real science is really hard - apparently too hard for many, yet they still get published - don't get retracted even if the experiment step fails to isolate things down to a single variable.

It is frustrating to be constrained by science, but it is the only tool there is to expand technology and our understanding of the world. We are surrounded by a sea of computers that remind us that we are living in the future - yet computers don't replace the discipline of thought needed to expand what we know. Computers may even be shortening the attention span needed to do careful thinking.

Even in physics there has been a problems with thinking a computer simulation equated to an experiment. ( I've worked with simulations in electronics - and fooled myself at times. Simulations can help save time, but in the end you absolutely need to test reality - with out such a step you are basically writing science fiction).

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!